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THE BEGINNING
When the night grows heavy
and departs from
the sky
you will remember the landscape
where you were born
a thousand years ago
or more,
you will remember the paths
your dreams used to pace,
you will remember the house
on the east side of the world,
and you will recognize words
that could have been
used to build hope.
You will let them circle
so as to reach the beginning
screened from your eyes
by the ruins inside
and around you.
-- Dragan Dragojlovic
(Serbia)
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GREAT WAVE
We saw the world end
in a ball of fire
two balls of fire
& puffs of dust
outrunning gravity
blowing off
the laws of physics
2 planes took out 3 towers
it was a miracle it meant
anything can happen
in reality
it was the Middle Ages
mind-bending demons & wonders
mounting a comeback
the Enlightenment
was shockt it decayed
into too many words
with too little to say
brain waves heart rhythms
emanations of the flesh
mirrors of the soul
warped that day
their ashen darkness falling away
like the great wave of Hokusai,
the vast horde of its waters
storming up & over
the little fishermen
in their little boats
Mount Fuji shines
in distance
white & serene
. . . we woke
to fire & smoke
small bodies on TV
holding hands
walking out of windows
buildings
give up their ghosts
over & over
on TV after TV
spewing toxic dust
haunting down the day
of panicked faces, eyes
running half looking back
at the science fiction
choking their streets. . .
Hokusai's fishermen cling
to the gunnels
of their slender boats
the Great Wave
the menace
& beauty of it
hanging over them
is as perfect & as still
in its blackness & blueness
as Fuji in the brilliance
of its canopy of snow
it is what it is
here nothing is
we have learned to read miracles
as the signs of a conspiracy
we have manged to live
with murder & torture
in the name of a homeland
we have never lived in
trapped in a web
of blood-&-soil
fear like a filthy sack
pulled down over our heads --
we will never now not see
human beings rendered
walking on air, as though
treading the heaviness of water
feeling for the bottom
for all to see
the dignity the immensity
of their death, & of their littleness
against the spectacle
of the New American Century
where the world we knew ended
--floor by screaming floor--
in the first murders of the terror war
-- James Scully
(from Oceania, a sheaf of poems)
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CACKLING IN THE NEW CENTURY
Cavafy has awakened
to a terrible scream.
Neither Auschwitz
nor the flight of astronauts
has stilled poetry.
Saved by the scream
it goes on, for no reason.
Like the goose on the Roman ramparts
cackling, it heralds the new century--
The barbarians go!
The barbarians come!
From up above, from down below,
from outside, from inside
crashing the rotted gates!
-- Srba Ignjatovic
(Serbia)
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THIS IS A HUMAN BEING
this is a human being
look what an A-bomb has done to it
the flesh swells so horribly
and both men and women are reduced to one form
"Help me!" says the faint cry
leaking from the swelled lips, the terribly
burned mess of a festered face
this, this is a human being
this is a man's face
-- Tamiki Hara
trans. Ichiro Kono & Rikutaro Fukuda
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A NEW PICTURE OF THE WORLD
In the morning
we awaken slowly, rubbing our eyes,
seeking in our reality
the worlds we dwelled in
dreaming.
Except for the sky,
no one will come to the door
or to our windows,
and our wish to
talk about bridges
and boundless rivers
will remain vain.
Where words cannot reach
ignorance reigns.
The last cry of the bird of paradise
falls into the darkness of earth
while our lengthy communion
attempts to shape
a new picture of the world.
-- Dragan Dragojlovic
(Serbia)
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LEAFLET No.1 TO THE 11TH GRADE STUDENTS
I will not burn a store
My daughter's boyfriend will not smash shop windows
But you
You
You
The students of the 11th grade
One day you will put Dizengoff Center in flames
And then
The oligarchy that scrubs the pavements with the youth
That brainwashes them
That sends them to kill and be killed
That hangs them out to dry like a rag on the terrace of poverty
Will piss out of fear from under the armchair
And with sweaty hands will take out the book
And write you that big check
That big check
And you'll get your balls back
I see this day with my eyes
From Bar-Kochba Street to King George
Cracking store store bank bank
Dizengoff Center flares like a holiday bonfire
From the ashes of the money burning in the safes
The honour for work the social logic the joy the pride
And AH HA HA HA
Poverty wiped out misery ends
--- Aharon Shabtai, 2007
Note: Dizengoff Center is Tel Aviv's largest shopping mall.
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THE POET'S COAT
for Jeff Male (1946-2003)
When I cough, people duck away,
afraid of the coal miner's disease,
the imagined eruption of blood
down the chin. In the emergency room
the doctor gestures at the X-ray
where the lung crumples like a tossed poem.
You heard me cough, slipped off your coat
and draped it with ceremony across my shoulders,
so I became the king of rain and wind.
Keep it, you said. You are my teacher.
I kept it, a trench coat with its own film noir detective swagger.
The war in Viet Nam snaked rivers of burning sampans
through your brain, but still your hands
filled with poems gleaming like fish.
The highways of Virginia sent Confederate ghost-patrols
to hang you in dreams, a Black man with too many books,
but still you tugged the collar of your coat around my neck.
Now you are dead, your heart throbbing too fast
for the doctors at the veterans' hospital to keep the beat,
their pill bottles rattling, maracas in a mambo for the doomed.
On the night of your memorial service in Boston,
I wore your coat in a storm along the Florida shoreline.
The wind stung my face with sand, and with every slap
I remembered your ashes; with every salvo of arrows
in the rain your coat became the armor of a samurai.
On the beach I found the skeleton of a blowfish,
his spikes and leopard skin eaten away by the conqueror salt.
Your coat banished the conqueror back into the sea.
Soon your ashes fly to the veterans' cemetery at Arlington,
where once a Confederate general
would have counted you among his mules and pigs.
This poet's coat is your last poem.
I want to write a poem like this coat,
with buttons and pockets and green cloth,
a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man.
Teach me.
--- Martin Espada
(from The Republic of Poetry,
W.W. Norton, 2006)
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BEATITUDE / MORTMAIN
Bless the olive
our greenest fuel.
Crushed, savored, lit
it nurtures,
it illuminates.
Sold, it is a living.
Bulldozed . . .
it's history.
But when
the dead hands
of the six million
sow Lebanon's
groves with
evisceration --
they hang,
by the millions
unharvested --
their whirlwind
is yet to be reaped.
-- Robert Bagg
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OLD WOMAN WITH SMALL BOY
Frightened hunched over
looking for the last secrets of life
in the ground she walks on
infinitely tired of not being able
to even make an effort
all her spirit dimmed by the teasing of the light
with nothing to forget and everything present
weighing her down more each day
and she blaming her jitters on the earthquake
but he's all dolled up in his spotless sailor suit
absolutely taken with the birds flying past
-- Roque Dalton
translated by Hardie St. Martin
(from SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT,
Curbstone Press)
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IS SOMETHING MISSING?
for Grace and Bob
I must have lived my life all wrong,
never having had any grief counselors
or psychologists to comfort me on every move --
Imagine! -- I endured the death of my friend
all by myself and for me every new town
was a great adventure. Maybe that's why
I seldom cry at movies and am always ready
to kiss death on the mouth.
--- Alexander Taylor
(from DREAMING AT THE GATES OF FURY)
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